Established by the Sweetwater Baptist Association, the university is named for early donors James B. Simmons and John G. Hardin. Its initial curriculum of high school subjects expanded over the years, and the university offered its first bachelor’s degrees in 1909 and graduate programs in 1926.
Caldwell Music Hall (1922, David S. Castle Co.) is the most intact of the university’s early buildings. Castle’s use of deep red brick and buff stone trim set the color palette for the campus, and it is employed across a range of late-twentieth-century modern designs. The classical scheme is composed of a first floor with rusticated coursing and a two-story zone defined by Ionic pilasters. The entablature of stone and brick is topped by a brick parapet that is accented at the corner bays with stone cartouches.
At the center of the campus is a pair of three-story modernist academic buildings: Sandefer Memorial Hall (1949, David S. Castle Co. and Wyatt C. Hedrick) and Abilene Hall (1948, Hughes and Olds). These update the stylistic details of Caldwell Hall while adhering to its symmetrical, double-loaded-corridor institutional building typology.
The most singular modern building is the Jack and Adele Frost Center for the Visual Arts (1984, Tittle, Luther and Loving Partnership), planned with a triangular module to form a triangular block and a long parallelogram block. Low glazed slots signal the entrances in the otherwise windowless mottled red-and-black brick walls. Southeast of the Frost Center is the expansive Postmodern Logsdon School of Theology (1988, Tittle, Luther and Loving Partnership), incorporating the 350-seat Logsdon Chapel midway in the complex’s semicircular floor plan. The end wall of chapel’s apse is composed of a back-lit stained glass window executed by the Byrd Glass Company of Lubbock.